Open flame broiled cooking is highly desirable for meat products sold for public consumption, and such products have won wide customer acceptance based on their aesthetic appearance and taste to the palate.
Open flame cooking however requires constant and full time attention by a cook, and frequently results in meat products that are overdone in the thinner portions, and underdone in thicker portions. While this can be regulated to some extent by the thickness of the cut in beef products, it is difficult, if not impossible to achieve when broiling chicken or other irregularly shaped pieces of meat for sale to consumers. In particular, it is difficult to achieve in quick service restaurants which depend for the patronage on a uniformly prepared product that will appear visually the same and taste palatively the same each time the customer returns to the restaurant. With manual open flame cooking, this is difficult to achieve due to the differences in preferences by individual cooks or chefs, and at times, the work load imposed on a chef at peak lunch and dinner hours.
Therefore, there is currently a need in quick service restaurants for a method and apparatus which will rapidly and uniformly prepare meat products, particularly poultry products for consumption, wherein the product appearance simulates the appearance of an open flame broiled meat product.